Print service providers often operate a single printing press, such as a digital LEP (liquid electrophotography) printing press, to handle general commercial printing (GCP) jobs. A digital printing press is a high-speed, digital, industrial inkjet printing solution suitable for printing various GCP print jobs including, for example, high volume transaction jobs, direct mail jobs, book jobs and publishing jobs. Digital printing presses include webfed presses that print onto a continuous media web supplied by a roll of media from an unwinding device, and sheetfed presses that print onto precut media sheets supplied by one or more input media trays.
Print data delivered to a printing press generally includes a number of GCP print jobs in a list of jobs that are scheduled for printing. However, the print jobs have usually not yet been approved for printing, and each job on a list is different than the next. Consequently, a verification and calibration process is typically performed on each job before it is printed. This process often includes printing and examining one or more sample sheets from a print job to proof and/or color match the job. Proofing and color matching can involve making adjustments to the press in an iterative fashion to calibrate the press for job-related parameters and to verify that a print job will be printed correctly. Unfortunately, during these verification and calibration iterations the press is usually stopped (i.e., not printing). This creates periods of down-time that lower overall press productivity. Because the press utilization rate directly impacts the profitability of printing businesses, efforts to reduce down-time and increase press productivity are ongoing.
Throughout the drawings, identical reference numbers designate similar, but not necessarily identical, elements.